For the past decade, Sting has been mounting versions of his Tony-nominated musical, The Last Ship, all around the world, even stepping in to play the lead role of Jackie White in several productions and tours.
Now, in an interview with The Guardian newspaper, the 74-year-old former singer/bassist for the Police and solo star is suggesting that the loss of physically demanding jobs in which men use their hands has helped drive up the prevalence of toxic masculinity in our modern society.
Announcing that the musical inspired by Sting’s childhood in a family of English shipwrights will be returning to London’s West End this fall, the singer told the Guardian that modern deindustrialization has led to men being less physically productive.
“I work with my hands every day as a musician, and I’m lucky. It’s a rare thing for modern men to actually use their hands and use their strengths to do anything. We’ve lost something there,” said Sting, who earlier this month praised his adult children’s “extraordinary work ethic” in confirming that he doesn’t plan to hand over his considerable fortune to them. “I don’t have any answers, but maybe the toxicity in society at the moment is [a result of the fact] that we’ve lost that direction for our energy, that male strength. It’s rare we have to use it.”
The Last Ship debuted in Chicago in 2014 before moving on to Broadway, the U.K./Ireland, Toronto and then North American and world tours. It tells the story of the men who toil at a shipyard similar to the Swan Hunter’s yard at Wallsend, near where Sting grew up, before deindustrialization in the 1970s and 80s led to their closure.
The show features a mostly original score written by Sting, along with four previously released songs from his solo catalog, “Island of Souls,” “All This Time,” “When We Dance” and “Ghost Story.” The singer, who will once again star in the musical when it kicks off a run at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London in September, blamed the closure of the shipyards on the failure of a series of English governments, saying, “Britain’s wealth was created in the coalfields and the steel towns and the mill towns and the shipyards.” All of those skill sets were thrown on the scrapheap … for [late prime minister Margaret] Thatcher’s dream of a service economy.”
The story touches on the male characters’ feeling that the loss of their physically demanding work is tantamount to the erasure of their identities. “’For what are we men without a ship to complete?’,” one of the characters asks at one point.
And while it is a loving look at yet another industry that has fallen prey to the changes in industrialization in the modern era, Sting made it clear that his hands were meant for bass plucking, not the backbreaking work of welding, fabricating and pipe fitting. “I’m the guy who didn’t want to work there and for good reason,” he said.
“They were working in asbestos, all kinds of toxic chemicals. At the same time, I’m nostalgic for the sense of community that I was brought up in. That environment was so rich with symbolism,” the singer added. “The town, although it was depressed a lot of the time, was extremely proud of the ships that were built there. The work was awful and dangerous and hard, but those guys could look back and say: ‘Well, I built that.’ The civic pride was massive.”
Sting is currently on the road with his 3.0 solo band, who will set up shop for a run of nine shows at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York beginning on June 9.
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